Janko, R. (n.d.) Empedocles, On Nature I 233–364: A New Reconstruction of P. Strasb. Gr. Inv. 1665–6.

Richard Janko’s reconstruction of Empedocles, On Nature I 233–364 reinterprets the Strasbourg papyrus as evidence for the profound unity of Empedocles’ natural philosophy and religious anthropology. The central concept is cosmic mixture: all living beings arise and perish through the combination and dissolution of four elemental roots—fire, air, earth, and water—under the opposing powers of Love and Strife. Rather than separating physics from purification, the papyrus shows that Empedocles could explain the material constitution of the world while simultaneously presenting life as morally burdened by violence, embodiment, and reincarnation. The decisive case study is the fragment containing his lament over meat-eating, where the speaker’s regret links diet, guilt, and cosmic punishment to the same processes that govern biological formation and decay. Janko’s philological argument further strengthens this synthesis by proposing that the papyrus fragments belong to a more continuous passage of Book I than previous editors had allowed, thereby making Empedocles’ poem less disjointed and philosophically more coherent. The result is an image of early Greek thought in which science and religion are not antagonistic categories, but mutually implicated modes of explanation. Ultimately, Empedocles emerges as a poet-philosopher for whom matter is never merely inert: it is animated by attraction, repulsion, suffering, and ethical consequence. His cosmology therefore becomes a tragic metaphysics of life itself.